Many people (me included) have great results with standalone DVD recorders attached to our DTivos (assuming you are wanting to make a DVD backup of your recordings in case the hard drive fails). To have edit capabilities, get one with an internal hard drive.

If you have your DTivo networked you could transfer programs, but discussion of that sort of thing is not permitted in this forum. If you use the Google search engine and look for a deal on a Tivo database you may discover some entertaining reading.

It depends on what you mean by "transfer files." TiVos run Linux and use the Mac hard disk layout, so you can attach the drive to a computer with Linux installed (or that boots certain Linux variants from CD-ROM) and transfer OS files back and forth to your heart's content. This is true even if the computer is not a Mac; however....

TiVos store their recordings in a filesystem that's unique to TiVo. AFAIK, this format isn't easily read except by the booted TiVo, and to a lesser extent from certain specialized utilities (used for backing up a TiVo disk or copying its contents to another disk). Thus, you can't transfer TiVo recordings in the way you suggest.

As goony suggests, though, you can transfer recordings using networking and certain programs whose discussion is censored on this forum or by feeding the video output to whatever recording device you like (a VCR, a DVD-R, a computer with a video input card, etc.).

They use a variation of the apple partition table, and ext2 system partitions. and MFS media/data partitions. Direct acces to the MFS partitions isn't easy, and for the purposes of accessing recordings, forbidden within the rules of this forum.

__________________
Series 2 234 Hr Lifetime.
Window XP and Ubuntu Linux on my PCs.
Watching more and more in HD direct now.

MFS (TiVo) and HFS (Apple) have no relation what so ever. MFS is not the old Macintosh file system either. MFS is built from the ground up to handle very large blocks of data. I guess the only similarity is that the TiVo filesystem and the old Mac file system is that they are both flat file systems.

Nobody in this thread has said they are related. I think you misinterpreted what was written based on your own knowledge of the old Apple MFS filesystem (used on old Mac 400KB floppies), which as you say is unrelated to the MFS used by TiVo.

Quote:

MFS is not the old Macintosh file system either. MFS is built from the ground up to handle very large blocks of data. I guess the only similarity is that the TiVo filesystem and the old Mac file system is that they are both flat file systems.

There are two issues here:

The partition table format -- The TiVo uses the Apple partition table format, as used on Macintosh computers equipped with hard disks, although some models use a byte-swapping format that requires a special driver setting to read properly. The partition table enables multiple filesystems to be stored on a single hard disk. On a TiVo, several partitions are used for housekeeping, two partitions are used for the TiVo OS files, and the largest partitions are used to hold video files.

The filesystems used on individual partitions -- As I and classicsat have said, TiVo uses MFS (a TiVo-specific filesystem) for recordings, but ext2 (a Linux filesystem) for OS files. These filesystems are stored on separate partitions defined by an Apple-style partition table.

Believe me, I know what I'm talking about here. I've accessed TiVo hard disks on x86 PCs using Linux and transferred files to and from the ext2 partitions. I understand Linux partitions and filesystems pretty well, having written about them innumerable times in books and magazines.

Mac hard disk layout does not mean mac partitioning scheme. Hard disk layout could mean the filesystem layout, how the files are organized on the drive, ...

"Mac hard disk layout" is, by itself, ambiguous, and I should have been clearer. In the context of the whole post, though, my meaning should have been clear, since I later referred specifically to filesystems as something other than the "disk layout."